The ABC's of X's and O's: The Art of Play-Calling in the N.F.L.

The art of offensive play-calling is, indeed, just that -- an art. It is, and has always been, one of the most fascinating and intriguing facets of football.

It is a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse. It is the ultimate chess game.

Do we run or do we pass? And if we run, do we run inside or outside? Do we pass short or long? If we call this, does the defense call that? It is a guessing game. It is the vehicle used to find the best way to give offensive players the best chance to succeed.

In most instances in the National Football League, it is the responsibility of the offensive coordinator or the head coach himself.

''The coach making the calls must have full command of all of the plays,'' said Bill Walsh, who won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers, in part because he was a master of the play-calling trade. He currently is in the Hall of Fame and is back with the 49ers as an administrative assistant. One of his key roles this season, in fact, has been fine-tuning the 49ers' play-calling.

''The coach must be well-grounded,'' Walsh continued. ''When I was calling the plays early in my career as an assistant with a passing background for the Cincinnati Bengals, I used to fight tooth and nail right there on the sidelines with running backs coach Bill Johnson. He wanted to call all runs. If it was left up to me, we'd be dropping back there and throwing downfield all of the time. That taught me something. If you get a coach calling the plays who's trying to prove his philosophies in his area, you're in trouble.''

If the play-caller cannot make adjustments on the fly, trouble also lurks.

''I was also an assistant with the Raiders and we were playing Denver,'' Walsh said. ''Denver blitzed on every play. Tom Flores was our quarterback. He hit maybe 6 out of 20 passes for 160 yards. But he hit four long touchdown passes and we won, 28-0. That game left a mark on me, because we hadn't planned it or practiced it that way. That's showing adaptability to what defenses are trying to do to you.''

In pro football's earliest days, quarterbacks made the play calls on the field, in the huddle. In the 1950's, Cleveland Browns Coach Paul Brown was thought to be a maverick when he began sending in plays from the sideline, using players as messengers. Brown's thinking was that since he designed the offense and since he was the head coach, he deserved more control over the offense and over his team's chances to win. By the mid-1970's, with many of Brown's disciples having become head coaches themselves, there were just as many teams with the coaches calling plays as there were with the quarterbacks in charge.

Remember the big stink in Dallas in the 1970's, when quarterbacks Roger Staubach and Don Meredith wanted to call their own plays but Tom Landry, the head coach, reserved that right for himself? Landry, of course, was quite successful. And success in the N.F.L. is copied. By the 1980's, nearly all teams were relying on coaches to call the plays. And in today's game -- even though most quarterbacks have some options to change a play or audible at the line of scrimmage -- only one quarterback, Jim Kelly of the Buffalo Bills, calls his own plays, and even that happens sparingly.

It was Walsh who helped introduce into the pro game the concept of scripting the plays. When a play-caller scripts, he creates a list of plays -- usually 15 to 25 -- that he uses at the start of the game.

''Scripting is planning; it's contingency planning,'' Walsh said. ''The fewer decisions to be made during the game, the better. You don't want to live by your instincts. It's isolating each situation that comes up and establishing what comes up.''

In essence, scripting plays does two things: 1) It forces an offense to implement what it has practiced during the week and 2) It focuses on your strengths, regardless of what the defense is doing. As many as eight current N.F.L. teams, most of them led by former Walsh assistant coaches, now script plays, usually the first 15 of the game.

''It takes real nerve,'' Walsh said. ''If things aren't working, you can lose your nerve. The script makes you stay in the game plan and make it work. I often did the first 25. So, I did less thinking in the early stages of the game and I'd be less nervous. I would have check points for the defense. This way, I could orchestrate the first quarter of the game. I was able to initiate my plan. On third-and-1, for example, I'd go off that list to a short-yardage list. Then I'd go back to the script.

''You make much better decisions on Thursdays and Fridays than you do on Sundays. If anybody thinks they can make all of the decisions on Sundays, then that person often is simply hoping to be lucky.''

Coach Lindy Infante calls the plays for the Indianapolis Colts. He does not script plays.

''We do not script here because we get into the game and get the feel and try to adjust,'' Infante said. ''Our offense is set up in such a fashion that there is almost no end to it. It's put together in bits and pieces and you call each segment, each offensive position, to create a play. For example, the line-blocking, the formation, who gets the ball, all are called within the play. Some of our plays have five or six variations of the same play. It is almost a limitless offense. We don't have a tag for our offense, and we're not looking for one.''

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Infante said he uses this offensive system because the one thing he does not want to give a defense is play recognition.

''That's the biggest tool for a defense,'' Infante said. ''We can make up a play right there on the sideline. We can literally draw it up in the dirt. Players make it all work. They can take some of the worst play calls and make them the best. They can also take some of the most brilliant play calls and turn them into the worst plays.''

The Green Bay Packers call their plays with the offensive coordinator, Sherman Lewis, upstairs in a booth and with the head coach, Mike Holmgren, down on the sideline. They talk constantly via headsets. Holmgren makes the final decisions, but sometimes, Holmgren will tell Lewis to simply take over.

''We've worked together for 11 years; he knows how I think and I know how he thinks,'' Lewis said. ''You try to get into a rhythm during your play-calling.''

And sometimes, said Chan Gailey, the Pittsburgh Steelers' offensive coordinator, the more the rhythm works, the more imaginative you become.

''On game day, you listen and look,'' Gailey said. ''You have to take in as much as you can and turn that into what is best for the team. You initiate. You have a feeling. Something works. So you say, why not try this? Then that. It kind of snowballs. It is a confidence factor with coaches and with players.''

Tony Dungy, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' head coach, said that defensive play-callers scout offensive play-callers in much the same way that offenses scout defenses. What are his tendencies? Where does he go when he gets into trouble?

''The guys most difficult to defend are the ones that do not fall into a pattern,'' Dungy said. ''The toughest teams are the ones that can do everything out of one personnel group, who can run the same play on third-and-6 with the same personnel that they run a play on first-and-10. They give you three or four runs that look so alike and then play-action pass off those plays. That's tough.''

Mike Shanahan, head coach of the Denver Broncos, is one of today's most deceptive play-callers. His plays connect and flow off each other. He gets you thinking run and he passes. He gets you thinking pass and then he runs.

''Great offensive coordinators understand defense,'' Shanahan said. ''I spent most of my time with defenses. Most offensive coaches don't want you to know what they are doing; they don't want to share their secrets. So, I looked at defenses, I studied them, and I talked to defensive coaches. I picked their brains. I studied their films and I fit it into my offense.

''Back in the late 70's, I listened to Bill Walsh give a speech in Chicago. I was fresh out of college. That is where I learned about scripting plays. I script the first 15 and share them with my team and then I do a backup 15 that I keep. The second 15 are plays I want to make sure I use during the course of the game. It gives you a priority list. You don't have to think so much off the top of your head during a game.''

Shanahan and the other successful offensive play-callers realize this: If a defense is really good at stopping something, that often means there is something it is giving up. The good play-callers find it and exploit it.

''You are trying all the time to set up a play, to get the big play, but it doesn't have to come in the fourth quarter,'' Shanahan said. ''It might be there earlier and the key is to take advantage of it. That's what separates the great play-callers from the good ones.''